Author: margaret-heller

You’ve seen the letters GDPR in every single email you’ve gotten from a vendor or a mailing list lately, but you might not be exactly sure what it is. With GDPR enforcement starting on May 25, it’s time for a crash course in what GDPR is, and why it could be your new best friend whether you are in the EU or not.

First, you can check out the EU GDPR information site (though it probably will be under heavy load for a few days!) for lots of information on this. It’s important to recognize, however, that for universities like mine with a campus located in the EU, it has created additional oversight to ensure that our own data collection practices are GDPR compliant, or that we restrict people residing in the EU from accessing those services. You should definitely work with legal counsel on your own campus in making any decisions about GDPR compliance.

So what does the GDPR actually mean in practice? The requirements break down this way: any company which holds the data of any EU citizen must provide data controls, no matter where the company or the data is located. This means that every large web platform and pretty much every library vendor must comply or face heavy fines. The GDPR offers the following protections for personally identifiable information, which includes things like IP address: privacy terms and conditions must be written in easy to understand language, data breaches require quick notifications, the right to know what data is being collected and to receive a copy of it, the “right to be forgotten” or data erasure (unless it’s in the public interest for the data to be retained), ability to transfer data between providers, systems to be private by design and only collect necessary data, and for companies to appoint data privacy officers without conflicts of interest. How this all works in practice is not consistent, and there will be a lot to be worked out in the courts in the coming years. Note that Google recently lost several right to be forgotten cases, and were required to remove information that they had originally stated was in the public interest to retain.

The GDPR has actually been around for a few years, but May 25, 2018 was set as the enforcement date, so many people have been scrambling to meet that deadline. If you’re reading this today, there’s probably not a lot of time to do anything about your own practices, but if you haven’t yet reviewed what your vendors are doing, this would be a good time. Note too that there are no rights guaranteed for any Americans, and several companies, including Facebook, have moved data governance out of their Irish office to California to be out of reach of suits brought in Irish courts.

Where possible, however, we should be using all the features at our disposal. As librarians, we already tend to the “privacy by design” philosophy, even though we aren’t always perfect at it. As I wrote in my last post, my library worked on auditing our practices and creating a new privacy policy, and one of the last issues was trying to figure out how we would approach some of our third-party services which we need to provide services to our patrons but that did not allow deleting data. Now some of those features are being made available. For example, Google Analytics now has a data retention feature, which allows you to set data to expire and be deleted after a certain amount of time. Google provides some more detailed instructions to ensure that you are not accidentally collecting personally-identifiable information in your analytics data.

Lots of our library vendors provide personal account features, and those too are subject to these new GDPR features. This means that there are new levels of transparency about what kinds of tracking they are doing, and greater ability for patrons to control data, and for you to control data on the behalf of patrons. Here are a few example vendor GDPR compliance statements or FAQs:

Note that some vendors, like EBSCO, are moving to HTTPS for all sites that weren’t before, and so this may require changes to proxy servers or other links.

I am excited about GDPR because no matter where we are located, it gives us new tools to defend the privacy of our patrons. Even better than that, it is providing lots of opportunities on our campuses to talk about privacy with all stakeholders. At my institution, the library has been able to showcase our privacy expertise and have some good conversations about data governance and future goals for privacy. It doesn’t mean that all our problems will be solved, but we are moving in a more positive direction.

My library has used Omeka as part of our suite of platforms for creating digital collections and exhibits for many years now. It’s easy to administer and use, and many of our students, particularly in history or digital humanities, learn how to create exhibits with it in class or have experience with it from other institutions, which makes it a good solution for student projects. This creates challenges, however, since it’s been difficult to have multiple sites or distributed administration. A common scenario is that we have a volunteer student, often in history, working on a digital exhibit as part of a practicum, and we want the donor to review the exhibit before it goes live. We had to create administrative accounts for both the student and the donor, which required a lot of explanations about how to get in to just the one part of the system they were supposed to be in (it’s possible to create a special account to view collections that aren’t public, but not exhibits). Even though the admin accounts can’t do everything (there’s a super admin level for that), it’s a bit alarming to hand out administrative accounts to people I barely know.

This problem goes away with Omeka S, which is the new and completely rebuilt Omeka. It supports having multiple sites (which is the new name for exhibits) and distributed administration by site. Along with this, there are sophisticated metadata templates that you can assign to sites or users, which takes away the need for lots of documentation on what metadata to use for which item type. When I showed a member of my library’s technical services department the metadata templates in Omeka S, she gasped with excitement. This should indicate that, at least for those of us working on the back end, this is a fun system to use.

Trying it Out For Yourself

I have included some screenshots below, but you might want to use the Omeka S Sandbox to follow along. You can experiment with anything, and the data is reset every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. This includes a variety of sample exhibits, one is “A Battered Tin Dispatch Box” from which I include some screenshots below.

A Quick Tour Through Omeka S

This is what the Omeka Classic administrative dashboard looks like for a super administrator.And this is the dashboard for Omeka S. It’s not all that different functionally, but definitely a different aesthetic experience.

Most things in Omeka S work analogously to classic Omeka, but some things have been renamed or moved around. The documentation walks through everything in order, so it’s a great place to start learning. Overall, my feeling about Omeka S is that it’s much easier to tap into the powerful features with less of a learning curve. I first learned Omeka S at the DLF Forum conference in fall 2017 directly from Patrick Murray-John, the Omeka Development Team Manager, and some of what is below is from his description.

Sites

Omeka S has the very useful concept of Sites, which again function like exhibits in classic Omeka. Each site has its own set of administrative functions and user permissions, which allow for viewer, editor, or admin by site. I really appreciate this, since it allowed me to give student volunteers access to just the site they needed, and when we need to give other people access to view the site before it’s published we can do that. It’s easier to add outside or supplementary materials to the exhibit navigation. On the individual pages there are a variety of blocks available, and the layout is easier for people without a lot of HTML skills to set up.

Resource Templates

These existed in Omeka Classic, but were less straightforward. Now you can set a resource template with properties from multiple vocabularies and build the documentation right into the template. The data type can be text or URI, or draw from vocabularies with autosuggest. For example, you can set the Rights field to draw from Rights Statement options.

Items

Items work in a similar fashion to Omeka Classic. Items exist at the installation level, so can be reused across multiple sites. What’s great is that the nature of an item can be much more flexible. They can include URIs, maps, and multiple types of media such as a URL, HTML, IIIF image, oEmbed, or YouTube. This reflects the actual way that we were using Omeka Classic, but without the technical overhead to make it all work. This will make it easier for more people to create much more interactive and web-integrated exhibits.

Item Sets

Item Sets are the new name given to Collections and, like Items, they can have metadata from multiple vocabularies. Item Sets are analogous to Collections, but items can be in multiple Item Sets to be associated with sites to limit what people see. The tools for batch adding and editing are similar, but more powerful because you can actually remove or edit metadata in bulk.

Themes

Themes in Omeka S have changed quite a bit, and as Murray-John explained, it is more complicated to do theming than in the past. Rather than call to local functions, Omeka S uses patterns from Zend Framework 3, and so the process of theming will require more careful thought and planning. That said, the base themes provided are a great base, and thanks to the multiple options for layouts in sites, it’s less critical to be able to create custom themes for certain exhibits. I wrote about how to create themes in Omeka in 2013, and while some of that still holds true, you would want to consult the updated documentation to see how to do this in Omeka S.

Mapping

One of my favorite things in Omeka S is the Mapping module, which allows you to add geolocation metadata to items, and create a map on site pages. Here’s an example from the Omeka S Sandbox with locations related to Scotland Yard mapped for an item in the Battered Tin Dispatch Box exhibit.

This can then turn into an interactive map on the front end.

For the vast majority of mapping projects that our students want to do, this works in a very straightforward manner. Neatline is a plugin for Omeka Classic that allows much more sophisticated mapping and timelines–while it should be ported over to Omeka S, it currently is not listed as a module. In my experience, however, Neatline is more powerful than what many people are trying to do, and that added complexity can be a challenge. So I think the Mapping module looks like a great compromise.

Possible Approaches to Migration

Migration between Omeka Classic and Omeka S works well for items. For that, there’s the Omeka2 Importer module. Because exhibits work differently, they would have to be recreated. Omeka.net, the hosted version of Omeka, will stay on Omeka Classic for the foreseeable future, so there’s no concern that it will stop being supported any time soon, according to Patrick Murray-John.

Conclusion

We are still working on setting up Omeka S. My personal approach is that as new ideas for exhibits come up we will start them first in Omeka S. As we have time and interest, we may start to migrate older exhibits if they need continual management. Because some of our older exhibits rely on Omeka Classic pla but are planning to mostly create new exhibits in there that don’t rely on Omeka Classic plugins. I am excited to pair this with our other digital collection platforms to build exhibits that use content across our platforms and extend into the wider web.

Privacy policies are easy to ignore, but when done right, creating one can be a positive experience. In early 2017, several of the staff members at my library started having informal conversations about privacy in our digital platforms, largely a result of the release of ALA Library Privacy Checklists. After several months of talking, it became clear that we needed to get a formal group together to create a privacy policy. This would ensure that we were having conversations with everyone in the library, including our patrons, about privacy. This led to the creation of a Patron Privacy Task Force, which just wrapped up about six months of work. I co-chaired the group with the Head of Reference Services at one the libraries, and we had representatives from all library departments. The final result was just as we had hoped: a thorough and open process producing a clear and accurate policy we have provided to our patrons.

Because many libraries are working on similar projects, I wanted to describe our process and the lessons learned. While ultimately I am pleased with what we produced, I had to restrict the scope due to time and interest from the group, and there are some important takeaways from that.

Planning

When we started the project, construction in the library and changes in staffing were disrupting normal functions. We knew it was important to restrict the project to the time necessary to complete finite deliverables. Rather than creating a new committee, we felt it would be helpful focus effort on learning about privacy, and bringing that knowledge back to departments and standing committees as an embedded value. We had a member from every department across the libraries (which ended up being ten people) and intentionally included a mix of department heads, librarians, and paraprofessional staff. Varying perspectives across departments and functions helped create good discussions and ensured that we would be less likely to miss something important.

Nevertheless, such a large group can be unwieldy, and adding yet another set of meetings can be a challenge for already overburdened schedules. For that reason, my co-chair and I spent a lot of time preplanning all the meetings and creating a specific project plan that would be flexible to adapt to our needs, which we needed to do in the end. Our plan had our work starting in early August and ending in December with the goal to have: 1) a complete policy, 2) internal best practices documentation, and 3) an outreach plan. As it turned out, we did not complete all the internal documentation, but the policy and outreach plan were complete on time, and the policy went out to the public at the same time as when we reported on the work of the committee to all library staff in mid-January 2018.

One of the most useful aspects of our project was treating it as a professional development opportunity with a number of reading assignments to complete before the kickoff meeting and throughout the work period (I have included some of the resources we used below). We also ensured from time to time we returned to theoretical, or guiding, principles of our work when it felt like we were feeling too bogged down with minutia. The plan ended up starting with research, followed by reading, writing, and practical research, more theory, and a final push with completing the draft of the policy and working on documentation.

Conducting the Privacy Audit

After spending some time talking through the project and figuring out some mechanics, we moved into the privacy audit stage. This requires examining every system and practice the library uses in a systematic manner and determining whether this falls in line with best practices. The ALA Privacy Checklists help with the latter part, but we also relied on Karen Coyle’s Library Privacy Audit spreadsheets. The first step was to brainstorm all the systems we used in our daily work and how we used them, and then divide those up by department. We mapped the systems we used into the spreadsheets, with some additional systems added. For that reason, multiple departments who use the same system in different ways reviewed some systems, and other systems that were unique to a department were reviewed just by that one. We then used the checklists to verify that we had covered the essentials in our audits and to raise additional issues that the spreadsheets did not cover.

This was not always the most straightforward process for people unused to looking carefully at systems, but for that reason it was a useful process. By dividing the work up between departments, it meant that everyone in the library had a better chance to learn about how their work affected patron privacy and ask questions about the processes of other departments as patron information moves across the library. For example, when a patron requests that the library purchase a book, this is recorded in one system and leaves a trail through email as it goes between systems. After the request is placed, that information stays in various systems to ensure the patron gets the book after it arrives. As public and technical services talked through that process, it was easier to identify which pieces of it were important to good service and which created informational residue.

Compiling the audit results into a useful format was a challenge, and this is an area of this project that did not meet my initial hopes. My original plan was to create a flexible best practices manual that would record all the results of the audit and how closely they met the standards set by the checklists. In practice, that was way too complicated, and we ended up just focusing on the “Priority 1” actions, which are those that any library can meet no matter their technical abilities. In fact, many of our practices are much better than that, but breaking the work down into smaller steps was a much more feasible approach. Ultimately, the co-chairs took the research done by all the task force members and created a list of practices for each checklist that indicated where we met best practices and where we needed to do more work. We asked all departments to complete the project identified for each checklist by one year out, and to consider including “Priority 2” level projects in departmental goals for the following fiscal year.

Writing the Policy

The process for writing the policy itself was different from the audit, in that the first draft came entirely from the co-chairs and then went out the group for editing. This was to create a unified tone and help identify all the gaps in knowledge that the task force members could complete with their research. Writing the policy started with the ALA Privacy Policy Creation Toolkit, and in particular the “Sections to Include in a Privacy Policy.” I literally copied those sections into a blank document to start the writing process, though some of them were renamed or reorganized in the final version.

After writing the rough draft, I listed all the sections where I was missing important information, and relied on the task force to fill in those sections. This was a fascinating process as we tried to explain technical processes that each of us understood in a way the whole group could understand and explain to a patron. Explaining the way the scanners could accidentally store a patron’s email address was an example of something that took multiple attempts to get right in the policy. The difficulty I had in writing was useful in itself, however. Each time I felt embarrassed or confused about describing one of our practices told me that this practice needed to change. I hope when we go back to revise the policy, the difficult sections will be easier to write because the practices will be better.

Outreach and Next Steps

One of the important privacy tasks in the checklists is the need for education and outreach to staff and patrons. The process of writing the policy in the task force took care of a lot of staff education, but this will need to be an ongoing process. For that reason, we recommended that the task force reconvene to check on the progress of privacy improvements in 9-10 months after the adoption of the policy, but not necessarily with the exact same members. As we work through fixing our practices this will be a great opportunity to have additional conversations with library staff and include more detail.

No matter how many checklists or guidelines we consult, we will not be able to cover all scenarios. For that reason, we asked people to keep the following guiding principles in mind when making decisions about data collection that could affect patron privacy.

Is it necessary to collect this information?

Could I tell who an individual was even if there was no name attached?

If I need to collect this information, what is the data I can remove to obscure personal information?

To tell patrons about the policy we wrote a blog post and posted it on the library website. Obviously, this will not reach everyone, but at least will catch our most active users–we know from usability testing that people do look at our blog post headlines! Meanwhile, a set of recommended outreach practices included creating guides for how to turn on privacy features in browsers especially for specific vendor platforms with potentially problematic practices, partnering with our campus IT department on information security awareness, and presenting on privacy issues in research and teaching at a faculty professional development event.

Conclusion

As someone who enjoys writing policies and looking for ways to improve processes, this kind of project will always appeal to me. However, many members of the task force told me that it was a useful exercise to improve their own knowledge and keep up to date with how the privacy conversation has changed even in the last few years. Because this is such a constantly shifting topic, this will require active management to keep our policy accurate and our practices in line with changes in technology. The good news is that this was a grassroots effort that can be started up again with relatively little effort as long as someone cares to do so, which I suspect will now always be the case at my library.

Now that we are facing net neutrality regulation rollbacks here in the United States, what new roles could librarians play in the continued struggle to provide people with unrestricted access to information? ALA has long been dedicated to equal access to information, as clearly outlined in both the Core Values and Code of Ethics. You can read ALA’s Joint Letter to the FCC here. It emphasizes that “a non-neutral net, in which commercial providers can pay for enhanced transmission that libraries and higher education cannot afford, endangers our institutions’ ability to meet our educational mission.”

Net neutrality was discussed back in 2014 on this blog, with Margaret Heller’s post entitled “What Should Academic Librarians Know about Net Neutrality?” We recommend you start there for some background on the legal issues around net neutrality. It includes a fun trip into the physical spaces our content traverses through to get onto our screens. One of the conclusions of that post was that libraries need to work on ensuring that everyone has access to broadband networks to begin with, and that more varied access ensures that no company has a monopoly over internet service in a location. There have been a number of projects along these lines over the past decade and more, and we encourage you to find one in your area and get involved.

Library-based initiatives

Equal access to information starts with having access at all. Several libraries have kicked off initiatives in activities like loaning out wi-fi hotspots for several-month periods in New York City, Brooklyn, and Chicago.

Ideally everyone will have secure and private internet access.The Library Freedom Project has been working for years to protect the privacy of patrons, including educating librarians about the threat of surveillance in modern digital technology, working with Tor Project to configure Tor exit relays in library systems, and creating educational resources for teaching patrons about privacy.

These are some excellent steps towards a more democratic and equal access to information, but what happens if the internet as we know it fundamentally changes? Let’s explore some “alternative internets” that rely on municipal and/or grassroots solutions.

Mesh networks

You might be familiar with wireless mesh networks for home use. You can set up a wireless mesh network in your own house to ensure even coverage across the house. Since each node can cover a certain part of your house, you don’t have to rely on how close you are to the wireless router to connect. You can also change the network around easily as your needs change.

Mesh networks are dynamically routed networks that exchange routes, internet, local networks, and neighbors. They can be wireless or wired. Mesh networks may not be purely a “mesh” but rather a combination of “mesh network” technology as well as “point to point” linking, with connections directly linking to each other, and each of these connections expanding out to their local mesh networks. BMX6/BMX7, BATMAN, and Babel are some of the most popular network protocols (with highly memorable names!) for achieving a broad mesh network, but there are many more. Just as you can install devices in your home, you can cooperate with others in your community or region to create your own network. The LibreMesh project is an example of a way in which DIY wireless networks are being created in several European countries.

Municipal networks

Nineteen towns in Colorado are exploring alternate internet solutions, like a public alternative. Chattanoogaoffers public gigabit internet speeds. This has some major advantages for the city, including the ability to offer free internet access to low-income residents and ensure that anyone who pays for access gets the same level of access, which is not the case in most cities where some areas pay a high cost for a low signal. Even just the presence and availability of municipal broadband, “has radically altered the way local politicians and many ordinary Chattanoogans conceive of the Internet. They have come to think of it as a right rather than a luxury.”1 A similar initiative in Roanoke is the Roanoke Valley Broadband Authority, which in an interesting twist lobbied the Virginia legislature to reduce oversight of its activities in a bill that originally specifically stated that broadband services should focus on underserved areas–so a reminder that in many ways municipalities view this as an investment in business rather than a social justice issue. 2 In Detroit, the Detroit Community Technology Project is working to set up and bring community wireless to neighborhoods in Detroit. New York City‘s Red Hook neighborhood relied on their mesh network during Hurricane Sandy to stay connected to outside of New York. New York City also has the rapidly-growing NYC Mesh community with two supernodes and another coming later this year, uniting lower Manhattan with Northern and Central Brooklyn. Toronto also has an emerging mesh community with a handful of connected nodes. The Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center developed CUWiN, which provided open wireless networks in “Champaign-Urbana, Homer, Illinois, tribal lands of the Mesa Grande Reservation, and the townships of South Africa”. 3

Thinking big

Guifi.net is a wi-fi network that covers a large part of Spain and defines itself as “the biggest free, open and neutral network.” It was developed in 2004 as a response to the lack of broadband Internet, where commercial Internet providers weren’t providing a connection or a very poor one in rural areas of the Catalonia region. Guifi has established a Wireless Commons License as guidelines that can be adopted by other networks. At time of posting, 34,306 nodes were active, with over 17,000 planned.

Finally, Brooklyn Public Library was granted $50,000 from IMLS to develop a mesh network and called BKLYN Link, along with a technology fellowship program for 18-24 year olds. Looking forward to what emerges from this initiative!

Conclusion

The internet was started when college campuses connected to each other across first short geographic areas and eventually much longer distances. Could we see academic and public libraries working together and leading the return to old ways of accessing the internet for a new era?

Meanwhile, it’s important to ensure that the FCC has appropriate regulatory powers over ISPs, otherwise we have no recourse if companies choose to prioritize packets. You should contact your legislators and make sure that the people at your campus who work with the government are sharing their perspectives as well. You can get some help with a letter to Congress from ALA.

This year’s Open Access Week at my institution was a bit different than before. With our time constrained by conference travel and staff shortages leaving everyone over-scheduled, we decided to aim for a week of “virtual programming”, with a week of blog posts and an invitation to view our open access research guide. While this lacked the splashiness of programming in prior years, in another way it felt important to do this work in this way. Yes, it may well be that only people already well-connected to the library saw any of this material. But promotion of open access requires a great deal of self-education among librarians or other library insiders before we can promote it more broadly. For many libraries, it may be the case that there are only a few “open access” people, and Open Access Week ends up being the only time during the year the topic is addressed by the library as a whole.

All the Colors of Open Access: Black and Green and Gold

There were a few shakeups in scholarly communication and open access over the past few months that made some of these discussions more broadly interesting across the academic landscape. The on-going saga of the infamous Beall’s List has been a major 2017 story. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about Jeffrey Beall was emailed to me more than once, and captured the complexity of why such a list is both an appealing solution to a problem but also reliant on sometimes questionable personal judgements. Jeffrey Beall’s attitude towards other scholarly communications librarians can be simplistic and vindictive, as an interview with Times Higher Education in August made clear. June saw the announcement of Cabell’s Blacklist, which is based on Beall’s list, and uses a list of criteria to judge journal quality. At my own institution I know this prompted discussions of what the purpose of a blacklist is, versus using a vetted list of open access journals like the Directory of Open Access Journals. As a researcher in an article in Nature about this product states, it’s likely that a blacklist is more useful for promotion and tenure committees or hiring committees to judge applicants more than for potential authors to find good journals in which to publish.

This also completely leaves aside the green open access options, in which authors can negotiate with their publisher to make a version of their article openly available–often the final published version, but at least the text before layout. While publishing an article in an open access journal has many benefits, green open access can meet the open access goals of faculty without worrying about paying additional fees or worrying about journal quality. But we still need to educate people on green open access. I was chatting with a friend who is an economist recently, and he was wondering about how open access worked in other disciplines, since he was used to all papers being released as working papers before being published in traditional journals. I contrast this conversation with another where someone in a very different discipline who was concerned that putting even a summary of research could constitute prior publication. Given this wide disparity between disciplines, we will always struggle with widely casting a message about green open access. But I firmly believe that there are individuals within all disciplines who will be excited about open access, and that they will get at least some of their colleagues on board–or perhaps their graduate students. These people may be located in the interdisciplinary side, with one foot in a more preprint-friendly discipline. For instance, the bioethicists in the theology department, or the history of science people in the history department. And even the most well-meaning people forget to make their work open access, so making it as easy as possible while not making it so easy that people don’t know why they would do it–make sure there are still avenues for conversation.

Shaky Platforms

Making things easy to do requires having a good platform, but that became more complicated in August when Elsevier acquired bepress, which prompted discussions among many librarians about their values around open access and whether relying on vendors for open access platforms was a foolish gamble (the Library Loon summarizes this discussion well). This is a complex question, as the kinds of services provided by bepress’s Digital Commons go well beyond a simple hosting platform, and goes along with the strategy I pointed out Elsevier was pursuing in my Open Access 2016 post. Convincing faculty to participate in open access requires a number of strategies, and things like faculty profiles, readership dashboards, and attractive interfaces go a long way. No surprise that after purchasing platforms that make this easy, Elsevier (along other publishers) would go after ResearchGate in October, which is even easier to use in some ways, and certainly appealing for researchers.

All the discussion of predatory journals and blacklists (not to mention SciHub being ordered blocked thanks to an ACS lawsuit) seems old to those of us who have been doing this work for years, but it is still a conversation we need to have. More importantly, focusing on the positive aspects of open access helps get at the reasons people to participate in open access and move the conversation forward. We can do work to educate our communities about finding good open access journals, and how to participate legally. I believe that publishers are providing more green access options because their authors are asking for them, and we are helping authors to know how to ask.

I hope we were not too despairing this Open Access Week. We are doing good work, even if there is still a lot of poisonous rhetoric floating around. In the years I’ve worked in scholarly communication I’ve helped make thousands of articles, book chapters, dissertations, and books open access. Those items have in turn gone on to be cited in new publications. The scholarly communication cycle still goes on.

UPDATE: Just after this post was published, the U.S. Copyright Office released the long-awaited Discussion Document that was referenced below in this post. In this document the Copyright Office affirms a commitment to retaining the Fair Use Savings clause.

Libraries rely on exceptions to copyright law and provisions for fair use to provide services. Any changes to those rules have big implications to services we provide. With potential changes coming in an uncertain political climate, I would like to take a look at what we know, what we don’t know, and how it’s all related. Each piece as it currently stands works in relation to the others, and a change to any one of them changes the overall situation for libraries. We need to understand how everything relates, so that when we approach lawmakers or create policies we think holistically.

The International Situation

A few months back at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago, I attended a panel called “Another Report from the Swamp,” which was a copyright policy specific session put on by the ALA Office of Information Technology Policy (OITP) featuring copyright experts Carrie Russell (OITP), Stephen Wyber (IFLA), Krista Cox (the Association of Research Libraries [ARL]). This panel addressed international issues in copyright in addition to those in the United States, which was a helpful perspective. They covered a number of topics, but I will focus on the Marrakesh Treaty and potential changes to US Code Title 17, Section 108 (Reproduction by libraries and archives).

Stephen Wyber and Krista Cox covered the WIPO Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled (aka the Marrakesh Treaty), which the US is a signatory to, but has not yet been ratified by the US Senate (see Barack Obama’s statement in February 2016). According to them, in much of the developing world only 1% of published work is available for those with print disabilities. This was first raised as issue in 1980, and 33 years later debates at WIPO began to address the situation. This treaty was ratified last year, and permits authorized parties (including libraries) to make accessible copies of any work in a medium that is appropriate for the disabled individual. In the United States, this is generally understood to be permitted by Title 17 sections Fair Use (Section 107) and Section 121 (aka the Chaffee amendment), though this is still legally murky 1. This is not the case internationally. Stephen Wyber pointed out that IFLA must engage at the European level with the European Commission for negotiations at WIPO, and there is no international or cross-border provision for libraries, archives, or museums.

According to Krista Cox, a reason for the delay in ratification was that the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations wouldn’t move it to ratification unless it was a non-controversial treaty with no changes required for US law (and it should not have required changes). The American Association of Publishers (AAP) wanted to include recordkeeping requirements, which disability and library advocates argued would be onerous. (A good summary of the issues is available from the ALA Committee on Legislation). During the session, a staff attorney from the AAP stood up and made the point that their position was that it would be helpful for libraries to track what accessible versions of material they had made. While not covered in the session explicitly, a problem with this approach is that it would create a list of potentially sensitive information about patron activities. Even if no names were attached, the relatively few people making use of the service would make it possible to identify individual users. In any event, the 114th Congress took no action, and it is unclear when this issue will be taken up again. For this reason, we have to continue to rely on existing provisions of the US Code.

Along those lines, the panel gave a short update on potential changes to Section 108 of the Copyright Act, which have been under discussion for many years. Last year, the Copyright Office invited stakeholders to set up meetings to discussion revisions. The library associations met with them last July, and generally while the beneficiaries of Section 108 find revisions controversial and oppose reform, the Copyright Office is continuing work on this. One fear with revisions is that the Fair Use exception clause (17 § 108 (F)(4)) would be removed. Krista Cox reported that at the Copyright Society of the USA meeting in early June 2017, the Copyright Office reported that they were working on a report with proposed legislation, but no one has seen this report [NOTE: the report is now available.].

Implications for Revisions to Title 17

Moving beyond the panel, let’s look at the larger implications for revisions to Title 17. There are some excellent reasons to revise Section 108 and others–just as the changes in 1976 reflected changes in photocopying technology 2, changes in digital technology and the services of libraries require additional help. In 2008, the Library of Congress Section 108 Study Group released a lengthy report with a set of recommendations for revisions, which can be boiled down into extending permissions for preservation activities (though that is a gross oversimplification). In 2015 Maria A. Pallante testified to the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives on a wide variety of changes to the Copyright Act (not just for libraries), which incorporated the themes from that 2008 report, in addition to other later discussions. Essentially, she says that changes in technology and culture in the past 20 years made much of the act unclear and required application of loopholes and workarounds that were legally unclear. For instance, libraries rely heavily on Section 107, which covers fair use, to perform their daily functions. This report points out that those activities should be explicitly permitted rather than relying on potentially ambiguous language in Section 107, since the ambiguity means some institutions are unwilling to perform activities that may be permitted due to fear. On the other hand, that ambiguous language opens up more possibilities that adventurous projects such as HathiTrust have used to push on boundaries and expand the nature of fair use and customary practice. The ARL has a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use that details what is currently considered customary practice. With revisions, there enters the possibility that what is allowed will be dictated by, for instance, the publishing lobby, and that what libraries can do will be overly circumscribed. Remember, too, that one reason for not ratifying the Marrakesh Treaty is that allowances for reproductions for the disabled are covered by Fair Use and the Chaffee amendment.

Orphan works are another issue. While the Pallante report suggests that it would be in everyone’s interest to have clear guidance on what a good faith effort to identify a copyright holder actually meant, in many ways we would rather have general practice mandate this. Speaking as someone who spends a good portion of my time clearing permissions for material and frequently running into unresponsive or unknown copyright holders, I feel more comfortable pushing the envelope if I have clearly documented and consistently followed procedures based on practices that I know other institutions follow as well (see the Statement of Best Practices). This way I have been able to make useful scholarship more widely available despite the legal gray area. But there is a calculated risk, and many institutions choose to never make such works available due to the legal uncertainty. Last year the Harvard Office of Scholarly Communication released a report on legal strategies for orphan work digitization to give some guidance in this area. To summarize over 100 pages, there are a variety of legal strategies libraries can take to either minimize the risk of a dispute or reduce negative consequences of a copyright dispute–which remains largely hypothetical when it comes to orphan works and libraries anyway.

Future Considerations

There is one other important wrinkle in all this. The Copyright Office’s future is politically uncertain. It could be removed from the purview of the Library of Congress, and the Register of Copyrights be made a political appointment. This was passed by the House in April and introduced in the Senate in May, and was seen as a rebuke to Carla Haydenn. Karyn Temple Claggett is the acting Registrar, replacing Maria Pallante who resigned last year after Carla Hayden became the new Librarian of Congress and appointed (some say demoted) her to the post of Senior Advisor for Digital Strategy. Maria Pallante is now CEO of–you guessed it–the American Association of Publishers. The story is full of intrigue and clashing opinions–one only has to see the “possibly not neutral” banner on Pallante’s Wikipedia page to see that no one will agree on the reasons for Pallante’s move from Register of Copyrights (it may have been related to wasteful spending), but libraries do not see the removal of copyright from the Library of Congress as a good thing. More on this is available at the recent ALA report “Lessons From History: The Copyright Office Belongs in the Library of Congress.”

Given that we do not know what will happen to the Copyright Office, nor exactly what their report will recommend, it is critical that we pay attention to what is happening with copyright. While more explicit provisions to allow more would be excellent news, as the panel at ALA pointed out, lawmakers are more exposed to Hollywood and the content creator organizations such as AAP, RIAA and MPAA and so may be more likely to see arguments from their point of view. We should continue to take advantage of provisions we currently have for fair use and providing access to orphan works, since exercising this right is one way we keep it.

Is the future of research voice controlled? It might be, because when I originally had the idea for this post my first instinct was to grab my phone and dictate my half-formed ideas into a note, rather than typing it out. Writing things down often makes them seem wrong and not at all what we are trying to say in our heads. (Maybe it’s not so new, since as you may remember Socrates had a similar instinct.) The idea came out of a few different talks at the national Code4Lib conference held in Los Angeles in March of 2017 and a talk given by Chris Bourg. Among these presentations the themes of machine learning, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, voice search, and virtual assistants intersect to give us a vision for what is coming. The future might look like a system that can parse imprecise human language and turn it into an appropriately structured search query in a database or variety of databases, bearing in mind other variables, and return the correct results. Pieces of this exist already, of course, but I suspect over the next few years we will be building or adapting tools to perform these functions. As we do this, we should think about how we can incorporate our values and skills as librarians into these tools along the way.

Natural Language Processing

I will not attempt to summarize natural language processing (NLP) here, except to say that speaking to a computer requires that the computer be able to understand what we are saying. Human—or natural—language is messy, full of nuance and context that requires years for people to master, and even then often leads to misunderstandings that can range from funny to deadly. Using a machine to understand and parse natural language requires complex techniques, but luckily there are a lot of tools that can make the job easier. For more details, you should review the NLP talks by Corey Harper and Nathan Lomeli at Code4Lib. Both these talks showed that there is a great deal of complexity involved in NLP, and that its usefulness is still relatively confined. Nathan Lomeli puts it like this. NLP can “cut strings, count beans, classify things, and correlate everything”. 1 Given a corpus, you can use NLP tools to figure out what certain words might be, how many of those words there are, and how they might connect to each other.

Processing language to understand a textual corpus has a long history but is now relatively easy for anyone to do with the tools out there. The easiest is Voyant Tools, which is a project by Sinclair, Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell. It is a portal to a variety of tools for NLP. You can feed it a corpus and get back all kind of counts and correlations. For example, Franny Gaede and I used VoyantTools to analyze social justice research websites to develop a social justice term corpus for a research project. While a certain level of human review is required for any such project, it’s possible to see that this technology can replace a lot of human-created language. This is already happening, in fact. A tool called Wordsmith can create convincing articles about finance, sports, and technology, or really any field with a standard set of inputs and outputs in writing. If computers are writing stories, they can also find stories.

we would be wise to start thinking now about machines and algorithms as a new kind of patron — a patron that doesn’t replace human patrons, but has some different needs and might require a different set of skills and a different way of thinking about how our resources could be used. 2

One way in which we can start to address the needs of machines as patrons is by creating searches that work with them, which is for now ultimately to serve the needs of humans, but in the future could be for their own artificial intelligence purposes. Most people are familiar with virtual assistants that have popped up on all platforms over the past few years. As an iOS and a Windows user, I am now constantly invited to speak to Siri or Cortana to search for answers to my questions or fix something in my schedule. While I’m perfectly happy to ask Siri to remind me to bring my laptop to work at 7:45 AM or to wake me up in 20 minutes, I find mixed results when I try to ask a more complex question. 3 Sometimes when I ask the temperature on the surface of Jupiter I get the answer, other times I get today’s weather in a town called Jupiter. This is not too surprising, as asking “What is the temperature of Jupiter?” could mean a number of things. It’s on the human to specify to the computer to which domain of knowledge you are referring, which requires knowing exactly how to ask the question. Computers cannot yet do a reference interview, since they cannot pick up on the subtle hidden meanings or helping with the struggle for the right words that librarians do so well. But they can help with certain types of research tasks quite well, if you know how to ask the question. Eric Frierson (PPT) gave a demonstration of his project working on voice powered search in EBSCO using Alexa. In the presentation he demonstrates the Alexa “skills” he set up for people to ask Alexa for help. They are “do you have”, “the book”, “information about”, “an overview of”, “what I should read after”, or “books like”. There is a demonstration of what this looks like on YouTube. The results are useful when you say the correct thing in the correct order, and for an active user it would be fairly quick to learn what to say, just as we learn how best to type in a search query in various services.

Some Considerations

Alexa meme

Why ask a question of a computer rather than type in a question to a computer? For the reason I started this piece with, certainly–voice is there, and it’s often easier to say what you mean than write it. This can be taken pragmatically as well. If you find typing difficult, being able to speak makes life easier. When I was home with a newborn baby I really appreciated being able to dictate and ask Siri about the weather forecast and what time the doctor’s appointment was. Herein lies one of the many potential pitfalls of voice: who is listening to what you are saying? One recent news story puts this in perspective, as Amazon agreed to turn over data from Alexa to police in a murder investigation after the suspect gave the ok. They refused to do at first, but it is an open question as to the legal nature of the conversation with a virtual assistant. Nor is it entirely clear when you speak to a device where the data is being processed. So before we all rush out and write voice search tools for all our systems, it is useful to think about where that data lives what the purpose of it is.

If we would protect a user’s search query by ensuring that our catalogs are encrypted (and let’s be honest, we aren’t there yet), how do we do the same for virtual search assistants in the library catalog? For Alexa, that’s built into creating an Alexa skill, since a basic requirement for the web service used is that it meet Amazon’s security requirements. But if this data is subject to subpoena, we would have to think about it in the same way we would any other search data on a third party system. And we also have to recognize that these tools are created by these companies for commercial purposes, and part of that is to gather data about people and sell things to them based on that data. Machine learning could eventually build on that to learn a lot more about people than they think, which the Amazon Echo Look recently brought up as a subject of debate. There are likely to be other services popping up in addition to those offered by Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft. Before long, we might expect our vendors to be offering voice search in their interfaces, and we need to be aware of the transmission of that data and where it is being processed. A recent alliance formed called The Voice Privacy Alliance, which is developing some standards for this.

The invisibility of the result processing has another dark side. The biases inherent in the algorithms become even more hidden, as the first result becomes the “right” one. If Siri tells me the weather in Jupiter, that’s a minor inconvenience, but if Siri tells me that “Black girls” are something hypersexualized, as Safiya Noble has found that Google does, do I (or let’s say, a kid) necessarily know something has gone wrong? 4 Without human intervention and understanding, machines can perpetuate the worst side of humanity.

This comes back to Chris Bourg’s question. What happens to librarians when machines can read all the books, and have a conversation with patrons about those books? Luckily for us, it is unlikely that artificial intelligence will ever be truly self-aware with desires, metacognition, love, and need for growth and adventure. Those qualities will continue to make librarians useful to creating vibrant and unique collections and communities. But we will need to fit that in a world where we are having conversations with our computers about those collections and communities.

“What Happens to Libraries and Librarians When Machines Can Read All the Books?” Feral Librarian, March 17, 2017. https://chrisbourg.wordpress.com/2017/03/16/what-happens-to-libraries-and-librarians-when-machines-can-read-all-the-books/. ↩

As a side issue, I don’t have a private office and I feel weird speaking to my computer when there are people around. ↩

Libraries who use a flexible content management system such as Drupal or WordPress for their library website and/or resource discovery have a challenge in ensuring that their data is accessible to the rest of the library world. Whether making metadata useable by other libraries or portals such as DPLA, or harvesting content in a discovery layer, there are some additional steps libraries need to take to make this happen. While there are a number of ways to accomplish this, the most straightforward is to create an OAI-PMH feed. OAI-PMH stands for Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, and is a well-supported and understood protocol in many metadata management systems. There’s a tutorial available to understand the details you might want to know, and the Open Archives Initiative has detailed documentation.

Content management tools designed specifically for library and archives usage, such as LibGuides and Omeka, have a built in OAI-PMH feed, and generally all you need to do is find the base URL and plug it in. (For instance, here is what a LibGuides OAI feed looks like). In this post I’ll look at what options are available for Drupal and WordPress to create the feed and become a data provider.

WordPress

This is short, since there aren’t that many options. If you use WordPress for your library website you will have to experiment, as there is nothing well-supported. Lincoln University in New Zealand has created a script that converts a WordPress RSS feed to a minimal OAI feed. This requires editing a PHP file to include your RSS feed URL, and uploading to a server. I admit that I have been unsuccessful at testing this, but Lincoln University has a working example, and uses this to harvest their WordPress library website into Primo.

Drupal

If you use Drupal, you will need to first install a module called Views OAI-PMH. What this does is create a Drupal view formatted as an OAI-PMH data provider feed. Those familiar with Drupal know that you can use the Views module to present content in a variety of ways. For instance, you can include certain fields from certain content types in a list or chart that allows you to reuse content rather than recreating it. This is no different, only the formatting is an OAI-PMH compliant XML structure. Rather than placing the view in a Drupal page or block, you create a separate page. This page becomes your base URL to provide to others or reuse in whatever way you need.

The Views OAI-PMH module isn’t the most obvious module to set up, so here are the basic steps you need to follow. First, enable and set permissions as usual. You will also want to refresh your caches (I had trouble until I did this). You’ll discover that unlike other modules the documentation and configuration is not in the interface, but in the README file, so you will need to open that out of the module directory to get the configuration instructions.

To create your OAI-PMH view you have two choices. You can add it to a view that is already created, or create a new one. The module will create an example view called Biblio OAI-PMH (based on an earlier Biblio module used for creating bibliographic metadata). You can just edit this to create your OAI feed. Alternatively, if you have a view that already exists with all the data you want to include, you can add an OAI-PMH display as an additional display. You’ll have to create a path for your view that will make it accessible via a URL.

The details screen for the OAI-PMH display.

The Views OAI-PMH module only supports Dublin Core at this time. If you are using Drupal for bibliographic metadata of some kind, mapping the fields is a fairly straightforward process. However, choosing the Dublin Core mappings for data that is not bibliographic by nature requires some creativity and thought about where the data will end up. When I was setting this up I was trying to harvest most of the library website into our discovery layer, so I knew how the discovery layer parsed OAI DC and could choose fields accordingly.

After adding fields to the view (just as you normally would in creating a view), you will need to select settings for the OAI view to select the Dublin Core element name for each content field.

You can then map each element to the appropriate Dublin Core field. The example from my site includes some general metadata that appears on all content (such as Title), and some that only appears in specific content types. For instance, Collection Description only appears on digital collection content types. I did not choose to include the body content for any page on the site, since most of those pages contain a lot of scripts or other code that wasn’t useful to harvest into the discovery layer. Explanatory content such as the description of a digital collection or a database was more useful to display in the discovery layer, and exists only in special fields for those content types on my Drupal site, so we could pull those out and display those.

In the end, I have a feed that looks like this. Regular pages end up with very basic metadata in the feed:

Whereas databases get more information pulled in. Note that there are two identifiers, one for the database URL, and one for the database description link. We will make these both available, but may choose one to use only one in the discovery layer and hide the other one.

When someone does a search in the discovery layer for something on the library website, the result shows the page right in the interface. We are still doing usability tests on this right now, but expect to move it into production soon.

Conclusion

I’ve just touched on two content management systems, but there are many more out there. Do you create OAI-PMH feeds of your data? What do you do with them? Share your examples in the comments.

It’s Open Access Week, which for scholarly communications librarians and institutional repository managers is one of the big events of the year to reflect on our work and educate others. Over the years, it has become less necessary to explain what open access is. Rather, everyone seems to have a perception of open access and an opinion about it. But those perceptions and opinions may not be based on the original tenets of the open access movement. The commercialization of open access means that it may now seem too expensive to pursue for individuals to publish open access, and too complicated for institutions to attempt without buying a product.

In some ways, the open access movement is analogous to punk music–a movement that grew out of protest and DIY sensibilities, but was quickly coopted as soon as it became financially successful. While it was never free or easy to make work open access, changes in the market recently might make it feel even more expensive and complicated. Those who want to continue to build open access repositories and promote open access need to understand where their institution fits in the larger picture, the motivations of researchers and administration, and be able to put the right solutions together to avoid serious missteps that will set back the open access movement.

Like many exciting new ideas, open access is partially a victim of its own success. Heather Morrison has kept for the past ten years a tally of the dramatic growth of open access in an on-going series. Her post for this year’s Open Access Week is the source for the statistics in this paragraph. Open access content makes up a sizeable portion of online content, and therefore is more of a market force. BASE now includes 100 million articles. Directory of Open Access Journals, even after the stricter inclusion process, has an 11% growth in article level searching with around 500,000 items. There are well over a billion items with a Creative Commons license. These numbers are staggering, and give a picture of how overwhelming the amount of content available all told is, much less open access. But it also means that almost everyone doing academic research will have benefited from open access content. Not everyone who has used open access (or Creative Commons licensed) content will know what it is, but as it permeates more of the web it becomes more and more relevant. It also becomes much harder to manage, and dealing with that complexity requires new solutions–which may bring new areas of profit.

An example of this new type of service is 1Science, which launched a year ago. This is a service that helps libraries manage their open access collections, both in terms of understanding what is available in their subscribed collections as well as their faculty output. 1Science grew out of longer term research projects around emerging bibliometrics, started by Eric Archambault, and according to their About Us page started as a way to improve findability of open access content, and grew into a suite of tools that analyzes collections for open access content availability. The market is now there for this to be a service that libraries are interested in purchasing. Similar moves happened with alternative metrics in the last few years as well (for instance, Plum Analytics).

But the big story for commercial open access in 2016 was Elsevier. Elsevier already had a large stable of open access author-pays journals, with fees of up to $5000. That is the traditional way that large commercial publishers have participated in open access. But Elsevier has made several moves in 2016 that are changing the face of open access. They acquired SSRN in May, which built on their acquisition of Mendeley in 2013, and hints at a longer term strategy for combining a content platform and social citation network that potentially could form a new type of open access product that could be marketed to libraries. Their move into different business models for open access is also illustrated in their controversial partnership with the University of Florida. This uses an API to harvest content from ScienceDirect published by UF researchers, but will not provide access to those without subscriptions except to certain accepted manuscripts, and grew out of a recognition that UF researchers published heavily in Elsevier journals and that working directly with Elsevier would allow them to get a large dataset of their researchers’ content and funder compliance status more easily. 1 There is a lot to unpack in this partnership, but the fact that it can even take place shows that open access–particularly funder compliance for open access versions–is something about which university administration outside the library in the Office of Research Services is taking note. Such a partnership serves certain institutional needs, but it does not create an open access repository, and in most ways serves the needs of the publisher in driving content to their platform (though UF did get a mention of interlibrary loan into the process rather than just a paywall). It also removes incentives for UF faculty to publish in non-Elsevier journals, since their content in those journals will become even easier to find, and there will be no need to look elsewhere for open access grant compliance. Either way, this type of move takes the control of open access out of the hands of libraries, just as so many previous deals with commercial enterprises have done.

As I said in the beginning of this piece, more and more people already know about and benefit from open access, but all those people have different motivations. I break those into three categories, and which administrative unit I think is most likely to care about that aspect of open access:

Open access is about the justice of wider access to academic content or getting back at the big publishers for exploitative practices. These people aren’t going to be that interested in a commercial open access solution, except inasmuch as it allows more access for a lower cost–for instance, a hosted institutional repository that doesn’t require institutional investment in developers. This group may include librarians and individual researchers.

Open access is about following the rules for a grant-funded project since so many of those require open access versions of articles. Such requirements lead to an increase in author-pays open access, since publishers can command a higher fee that can be part of the grant award or subsidized by an institution. Repositories to serve these requirements and to address these needs are in progress but still murky to many. This group may include the Office of Research Services or Office of Institutional Research.

“Open access” is synonymous with putting articles or article citations online to create a portfolio for reputation-building purposes. This last group is going to find something like that UF/Elsevier partnership to be a great situation, since they may not be aware of how many people cannot actually read the published articles. This last group may include administrators concerned with building the institution’s reputation.

For librarians who fall into the first category but are sensitive to the needs of everyone in each category, it’s important to select the right balance of solutions to meet everyone’s needs but still maintain the integrity of the open access repository. That said, this is not easy. Meeting these variety of needs is exactly why some of these new products are entering the market, and it may seem easier to go with one of them even if it’s not exactly the right long-term solution. I see this as an important continuing challenge facing librarians who believe in open access, and have to underpin future repository and outreach strategies.

Carousels are a popular website feature because they allow one to fit extra information within the same footprint and provide visual interest on a page. But as you most likely know, there is wide disagreement about whether they should ever be used. Reasons include: they can be annoying, no one spends long enough on a page to ever see beyond the first item, people rarely click on them (even if they read the information) and they add bloat to pages (Michael Schofield has a very compelling set of slides on this topic). But by far the most compelling argument against them is that they are difficult if not impossible to make accessible, and accessibility issues exist for all types of users.

In reality, however, it’s not always possible to avoid carousels or other features that may be less than ideal. We all work within frameworks, both technical and political, and we need to figure out how to create the best case scenario within those frameworks. If you work in a university or college library, you may be constrained by a particular CMS you need to use, a particular set of brand requirements, and historical design choices that may be slower to go away in academia than elsewhere. This post is a description of how I made some small improvements to my library website’s carousel to increase accessibility, but I hope it can serve as a larger discussion of how we can always make small improvements within whatever frameworks we work.

What Makes an Accessible Carousel?

We’ve covered accessibility extensively on ACRL TechConnect before. Cynthia Ng wrote a three part series in 2013 on making your website accessible, and Lauren Magnuson wrote about accessibility testing LibGuides in 2015. I am not an expect by any means on web accessibility, and I encourage you to do additional research about the basics of accessibility. For this specific project I needed to understand what it is specifically about carousels that makes them particular inaccessible, and how to ameliorate that. When I was researching this specific project, I found the following resources the most helpful.

The basic issues with carousels are that they move at their own pace but in a way that may be difficult to predict, and are an inherently visual medium. For people with visual impairments the slideshow images are irrelevant unless they provide useful information, and their presence on the page causes difficulty for screen reading software. For people with motor or cognitive impairments (which covers nearly everyone at some point in their lives) a constantly shifting image may be distracting and even if the content is interesting it may not be possible to click on the image at the rate it is set to move.

You can increase accessibility of carousels by making it obvious and easy for users to stop the slideshow and view images at their own pace, make the role of the slideshow and the controls on the page obvious to screen reading software, to make it possible to control the slideshow without a mouse, and to make it still work without stylesheets. Alternative methods of accessing the content have to be available and useful.

I chose to work on the slideshow as part of a retheming of the library website to bring it up to current university branding standards and to make it responsive. The current slideshow lacked obvious controls or any instructions for screen readers, and was not possible to control without a mouse. My general plan in approaching this was to ensure that there were obvious controls to control the slideshow (and that it would pause quickly without a lot of work), have ARIA roles for screen readers, and be keyboard controllable. I had to work with the additional constraints of making this something that would work in Drupal, be responsive, and that would allow the marketing committee to post their own images without my intervention but would still require alt tags and other crucial items for accessibility.

My Approach

Because the library’s website uses Drupal, it made sense to look for a solution that was designed to work with Drupal. Many options exist, and everyone has a favorite or a more appropriate choice for a particular situation, so if you are looking for a good Drupal solution you’ll want to do your own research. I ended up choosing a Drupal module called Views Slideshow after looking at several options. It seemed to be customizable enough that I was pretty sure I could make it accessible even though it lacked some of the features out of the box. The important thing to me is that it would make it possible to give the keys to the slideshow operation to someone else. The way our slideshow traditionally worked required writing HTML into the middle of a hardcoded homepage and uploading the image to the server in a separate process. This meant that my department was a roadblock to updating the images, and required careful coordination before vacations or times away to ensure we could get the images changed. We all agreed that if the slideshow was going to stay, this process had to improve.

Why not just remove the slideshow entirely? That’s one option we definitely considered, but one important caveat I set early in the redesign process was to leave the site content and features alone and just update the look and feel of the site. Thus I wanted to leave every current piece of information that was an important part of the homepage as is, though slightly reorganized. I also didn’t want to change the size of the homepage slideshow images, since the PR committee already had a large stock of images they were using and I didn’t want them to have to redesign everything. In general, we are moving to a much more flexible and iterative process for changing website features and content, so nothing is ruled out for the future.

I won’t go into a lot of detail about the technical fixes I made, since this won’t be widely applicable. Views Slideshow uses a very standard Drupal module called Views to create a list of content. While it is a very popular module, I found it challenging to install correctly without a lot of help (I mainly used this site), since the settings are hard to figure out. In setting up the module, you are able to control things like whether alt text is required, the most basic type of accessibility feature, which allows users who cannot see images to understand their content through screen readers or other assistive technologies. Beyond that, you can set some things up in the templates for the modules. First I created a Drupal content type is called Featured Slideshow. It includes fields for title of the slide, image, and the link it should go to. The image has an alt and title field, which can be set automatically using tokens (text templates), or manually by the person entering data. The module uses jQuery Cycle to control which image is available. I then customized the templates (several PHP files) to include ARIA roles and to edit the controls to make them plain English rather than icons (I can think of downsides to this approach for sure, but at least it makes the point of them clear for many people).

ARIA role. This is frequently updated but non-essential page content. Its default ARIA live state is “off”, meaning unless the user is focused on it changes in state won’t be announced. You can change this to “polite” as well, which means a change in state will be announced at the next convenient opportunity. You would never want to use “assertive”, since that would interrupt the user for no reason.

Features I’m still working on are detailed in The Unbearable Inaccessibility of Slideshows, specifically keyboard focus order and improved performance with stylesheets unavailable. However with a few small changes I’ve improved accessibility of a feature on the site–and this technique can be applied to any feature on any site.

Making Small Improvements to Improve Accessibility.

While librarians who get the privilege of working on their own library’s website have the possibilities to guide the design choices, we are not always able to create exactly the ideal situation. Whether you are dealing with a carousel or any other feature that requires some work to improve accessibility, I would suggest the following strategy:

Review what the basic requirements are for making the feature work with your platform and situation. This means both technically and politically.

Research the approaches others have taken. You probably won’t be able to use someone else’s technique unless they are in a very similar situation, but you can at least use lessons learned.

Create a step by step plan to ensure you’re not missing anything, as well as a list of questions to answer as you are working through the development process.

Test the feature. You can use achecker or WAVE, which has a browser plugin to help you test sites in a local development environment.

Review errors and fix these. If you can’t fix everything, list the problems and plan for future development, or see if you can pick a new solution.

Test with actual users.

This may seem overwhelming, but taking it slow and only working on one feature at a time can be a good way to manage the process. And even better, you’ll improve your practices so that the next time you start a project you can do it correctly from the beginning.